Today’s theme is Is there a female ancestor who is your brick wall? Why? List possible sources for finding more information., and since GenWestUK, who gave me the idea, is in the west of England, I’m choosing a couple from that part of the, world too.

The first one is Mary Barber, who was my great great great grandmother. She married Simon Smallridge Stooke in Hennock, Devon, England, on 11 December 1813, and that’s about all I know of her.

Though, according to the 1851 Census of England she was apparently born in Hennock in about 1796, the Online Parish Clerk for Hennock, who kindly looked them up for me, said that the only Mary Barber baptised there was born in 1791. Perhaps she lied about her age on the census, so I’m not sure of her parents.

Her husband, Simon Smallridge Stooke, was baptised in Ashton, Devon, on 4 May 1788, the son of Francis Stooke and Ann Smallridge. He was a farmer of Chudleigh, and he and Mary Barber had two sons (that we know of), Thomas and Francis. Simon died in 1828 at about the age of 40. The elder son, Thomas, went to Bristol and married Mary Harriet Hollins. The younger son, Francis, does not seem to have married or had children, but what happened to him is uncertain too — there is a possible death record for him in the 1840s.

Our other brick wall there is Mary’s mother-in-law, Ann Smallridge, who married Francis Stooke at Ashton, Devon, on 26 June 1775. Actually she is not so much a brick wall as her parents, as we would love to know more about them. She was from Doddiscombsleigh, a village a couple of miles north of Ashton, and possibly the daughter of Simon and Elizabeth Smallridge of Doddiscombsleigh, where she was probably baptised in 1748.

Mary Barber has been a brick wall for a long time, but perhaps that wall ids beginning to crumble…